Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.
The Abyss: Special Edition (James Cameron)
One of the most-requested restorations from cinephiles for some time has been a new restoration and 4K release for James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi aquatic adventure The Abyss. Your wish has now come true as The Abyss: Special Edition, a 4K remaster, recently returned to theaters for one night only last week and is now available digitally ahead of a home video release this March.
Where to Stream: VOD
Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)
A sultry, creamy western that feels more like a vacation, Asteroid City is an absolute delight, Anderson’s best since The Grand Budapest Hotel. It practically begs you to sit back, relax, and enjoy yourself. Hell, it might even want you to take a nap, but not for lack of entertainment. As the characters of Asteroid City know all too well, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” Remember that. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Prime Video
Barbie (Greta Gerwig)
Gerwig is undoubtedly doing the thing: making Barbieland a hyper-stylized reality full of musical numbers, unique props, and arcane lore. The world she’s built for her Barbies, under either government system, is really funny, dense with jokes and asides and winks towards the brand’s long, complicated history. It’s a relief to watch a big-budget movie this summer that spent its money on a unique visual language. There’s not just one dream house, but a whole cul-de-sac of dream houses. The hills are alive with the sound of Barbie! At its sharpest, Gerwig and Baumbach’s script harken back to the former’s work in coming-of-age comedies––Frances Ha, Mistress America, even Lady Bird. Gosling gets the majority of the laugh lines, Ken’s men’s-rights awakening pushing his limited brain capacity to its very limit as he learns how to oppress. – Fran H. (full review)
Where to Stream: Max
Blue Jean (Georgia Oakley)
The Blue Jean of David Bowie’s 1984 hit was a girl with “a camouflage face,” not unlike the singer and the two personas he splintered into for the song’s video: a djinn-like rockstar dancing onstage and his ordinary, besuited doppelganger watching from below. So it is for the young woman at the center of Georgia Oakley’s own Blue Jean. A PE teacher stranded in Tyneside, England, Jean (Rosy McEwen) is a divorcée in a same-sex relationship that no-one––least of all her pupils and co-workers––must ever know about. For the year is 1988 and Britain’s grappling with the revolting aftermath of Section 28. The bill passed by Thatcher’s government banned “the promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities, forcing people like Jean into hiding. Camouflaging––its costs and consequences––is at the cornerstone of Oakley’s frank, often quite gripping feature debut. If Blue Jean does not debunk or reinvent new tropes in its tale of self-acceptance (does it have to, anyway?) it still radiates a rebellious energy, courtesy McEwen’s riveting performance and Oakley’s ability to never make her outcasts feel like lessons. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (Sam Fell)
Many people (this reviewer included) scoffed at the announcement of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. Something about the ludicrous title and 23-year hiatus gave the air of a studio in desperation, or one searching for an Oscar contender. How wrong we were. For in spite of the long wait and changes of personnel––Zachary Levi and Thandiwe Newton replace Mel Gibson and Julia Sawalha; Sam Fell replaces Nick Park and Peter Lord––this latest adventure is every bit as well-crafted, cleverly written, and stuffed with gallinaceous puns as its predecessor. – Oliver W. (full review)
Where to Stream: Netflix
The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno)
Near the halfway point of The Delinquents, a funny, existential epic from Argentina, a banker dips into an arthouse cinema. Though almost all the seats are free he can’t decide which one to choose. What’s the point of all those options, the film asks, if you’re always left wanting more? In another moment the elder statesman of a prison yard explains that the only advantage a cellmate holds over those outside is having all the time in the world to think. (What’s the point of freedom itself if you’re a slave to the algorithm?) “There wasn’t more freedom,” another man explains, reminiscing about an objectively worse era in Argentinian history, “but you could smoke anywhere.” – Rory O. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Divinity (Eddie Alcazar)
One of two projects on this list that exists due to Steven Soderbergh’s relentless pursuit to bring visionary independent filmmakers’ imaginations to the screen, Divinity is, with the utmost guarantee, unlike anything you’ve seen before. And I mean that for the better. Eddie Alcazar’s abrasive, densely grainy, black-and-white experimental sci-fi horror is a cosmic mindfuck of the highest order: digital video-game aesthetics meet a sinister psychedelia nestled away in a desert landscape from which a monster begs to emerge at the will of near-alien brothers. Here’s hoping Soderbergh opened the door for whoever wants to next back the selfless filmmaker, who wears a mask in interviews to shirk identity as much as importance. – Luke H.
Where to Stream: VOD
Final Cut (Michel Hazanavicius)
Having (admittedly) never seen Shin’ichirō Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead I’m unsure to what degree his remake, Final Cut, is riffing or reinventing the basic premise, but it’s not hard to detect some personal angle when a seeming Hazanivicius stand-in, fading French director Remi (Romain Duris), serves as the lead. An opportunity for the helmer comes when he’s pitched by savvy producers on remaking a Japanese zombie horror film which will serve as the debut content of a new streaming service called Z, a European equivalent to the horror channel Shudder. The catch: it has to be a one-take, 30-minute live-stream. (Memories of Woody Harrelson’s directorial debut Lost in London, anyone?) – Ethan V. (full review)
Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection
How to Have an American Baby (Leslie Tai)
A fascinating and sometimes harrowing documentary about the many Chinese women who pay thousands of dollars to travel to the US to give birth. This large, though little discussed, industry, which comprises recruitment agencies in Beijing and ‘maternity hotels’ in the US, is here seen from the points of view of two women, whose experiences of the American healthcare system are tragically opposed, with occasional comments from various stern doctors, lousy husbands, and disgruntled townsfolk. The result is deeply affecting but not wholly satisfactory, since the answer to the question of why these women want to go to the US in the first place is scarcely developed beyond corndogs and baseball. – Oliver W.
Where to Stream: POV
The Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski)
The Matrix Resurrections is misshapen, haphazard, and some of the happiest a film has made me in 2021, regularly inspiring surprises and enthusiasms the contemporary tentpole long deemed irrelevant. Though less a take-it-or-leave-it gauntlet-toss than Lana Wachowski’s more boldly experimental endeavors, the virtues of her fourth Matrix are often in excess of anything she’s made since the polarizing-but-great sequels, sometimes in contradiction to the matter of us even watching it—a work about the fact that it nearly should not exist. – Nick N. (full review)
Where to Stream: Hulu
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 to, sadly, so little enthusiasm outside the highbrow crowd that it didn’t finally land in North American theaters until three years later. Initially mystifying even to fans of Hou for being so “minor” after a number of historical dramas, it’s had a second act—seemingly earning the mantle of the director’s most popular film, at least judging by Letterboxd-logging stats. It’s curious to reflect on the reason for its elevated reputation, yet easy to recognize why it’s a particular favorite to aging millennials who serve as our chief tastemakers. And now on the occasion of a new 4K restoration, the film has the chance to be experienced theatrically for the first time by many of its biggest admirers, where its hypnotic rhythms and neon world can be better appreciated than on a ruddy specialty label DVD from the mid-2000s. – Ethan V. (full feature)
Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection
Priscilla (Sofia Coppola)
There’s no big screaming match in Priscilla, no takedowns, no zingers. It’s a refreshing and unexpected choice for a movie that ends in divorce. A child of her father, Coppola has a sixth sense for the language of cinema, for communicating complex themes effectively without being heavy-handed or coercive. Take, for instance, the Vegas phase. It seems like a unwieldy period to cover, but she tells us everything we need to know in two shots, the weight of a feature within them: Elvis at rock-bottom in his legendary Vegas penthouse, a cave-like darkness swallowing him and hellish neon glow pulsing through the windows as if he’s trapped inside a lit cigarette, each drag from the giant demon smoking it a soul-sucking experience; then Priscilla in Los Angeles, in the sun, meeting new people, laughing, smiling, open––as simple (and rewarding) as a great conversation. – Luke H. (full review)
Where to Stream: VOD
The Store (Frederick Wiseman)
The master documentarian films the main Neiman-Marcus and corporate headquarters in Dallas, TX, during the four weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. His two-hour observational study is a disarmingly charming spectacle of ’80s shopping habits and selling strategies as people browse for last-minute holiday gifts.
Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club
The Unknown Country (Morrisa Maltz)
Beginning with a departure in the dead of night in the middle of winter, and ending perhaps where its lead Tana (Lily Gladstone) was destined to go, Morrisa Maltz’s road trip film The Unknown Country was one of the most exciting offerings at SXSW. In a haunting exploration of biography and geography, Tana traverses a landscape from South Dakota to Texas, along the way stopping to examine lives well-lived as the film enters a quasi-documentary mode. The world proves quite a free place for Tana and we are given delightful, sometimes inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking insights into the people we pass by. They tell us their life stories as Tana flows between hotels, diners, gas stations, beer gardens, and convenience stores. – John F. (full review)
Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)
Also New to Streaming
Film Movement+
Pushing Hands
Hulu
Aporia
MUBI (free for 30 days)
A Tiger in Paradise
Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian
Certain Women
Summer of 85
In Bed with Victoria
Netflix
Gran Turismo
Paramount+
Finestkind
Prime Video
In Fabric
Killer Joe
Summer of 85